June 2018 started off full of excitement and promise. My husband and I celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary in July, so we decided to take a little getaway trip at the beginning of the summer. Just the two of us. If you have kids, you know how much work goes into getting away without them. I had bags to pack, kids to transport to Memphis, dogs to deliver to the dog sitter, and more bags to pack. You get the idea. On top of that, I had just had a baby boom at work. All of my newborns were born before we left, so I had last minute sessions to squeeze in. Then came our trip…. It was fabulous! Amazing. We spent a week at Couples San Souci in Ocho Rios. We had been to Couples Swept Away a few years ago and loved it so much, we decided to try the other side of the island. The resort was quiet, laid back, and beautiful. Just what we needed.
When we returned, it was back to reality right away. I met my mother in law in Jackson to pick up my boys and got back to the real world. I had weeks of sessions to edit and a week’s worth of emails to catch up on. I got back to work on Monday, caught up on all emails by Tuesday, and was ready to get back to editing on Wednesday. I woke up Wednesday morning planning to blog a session before I started editing and realized my website wasn’t working. Hmmm…. This has happened a few times, so I didn’t panic. At 6:41am I sent a help ticket to my host Bludomain.com and got back to editing. As I was editing, I kept checking my email and no emails were coming in. Well, I had been out of town for a week and had just sent tons of emails back to people. My inbox should have been flooded. So I sent a test email from my personal email address, and it didn’t come through. Sooooo, I sent another help ticket to my host Bludomain.com this time marking it as an “emergency” to tell them that my email wasn’t working either. Finally at 10:44 am, I get this response
BluDomain Support team”
What??? This was definitely not what I was expecting to hear. I didn’t have a good feeling about what they said, so I decided to get on their Facebook page. They made this same announcement, and people were commenting. I decided to join the conversation and followed it throughout the day. However, every question I asked never got answered. I realized that Bludomain.com was hiding my comments! Once I realized this, I started panicking. No one had responded to my tickets and now my comments were being hidden.
Fast forward to Thursday. I sent an email at 5:50am,
“We are so very sorry for the continued inconvenience this down time has caused. Our first priority is to get email back up and running but to do that the accounts first have to be restored. As you can tell this is an extremely time consuming process. Without getting into details that are too technical, this is a simple case of where a machine has failed us, with catastrophic results. All we can do, given this scenario, is to work as diligently as possible to get the content back up and running.Moving forward I would like to offer some options, unfortunately neither option is ideal:
1: Wait for the account to get restored; you would have your email back within the next 24 hours or so but the website and content will take a bit longer to restore. This process could take several days.
2. We can expedite the restoration of your account and email and images should be restored. We would need to set up a blank new site and we can assist you in uploading the images to your site. All the text content would have to be re-entered… sorry.
3: As a third option we would like to offer you the choice to move to a new hosting account with a blank site of your choice. We can reconfigure email for you and assist you with uploading your content – content from your previous site is not accessible at this time, however. Please let us know if you want to move forward with this option.
Unfortunately, in retrospect, this is not an issue anyone could have predicted, once we resolve this we will do all we can to ensure that it does not happen again.
BluDomain management”
Now, I forward all of my emails into Gmail, so all of my emails are backed up on Gmail’s server. I wasn’t worried about losing my emails, I just wanted to get access to my email. Finally by lunch time, they had moved my email to a new server so that I could get emails again. Unfortunately, all emails that came in during those 30 hours were gone forever.
Now let’s get to my website. “Catastrophic results?” What did this mean? I have been in business for 9 years, so I had hundreds of blog posts. Years of pictures, stories, triumphs, and more. Could they all be gone? I knew they shouldn’t be. I backed up my site through a plug in once a week. It would all be restored right? Ok, I’ve got my email working. Clients can get in touch with me. But what about new clients? Lots of people find me on Google. I tried Googling my name. My website still showed up but of course you couldn’t get any text. People could only get in touch with me through social media. So I sat and waited and continued to try to keep up with editing. All while having a constant sick feeling in my stomach. Throughout the week, I would check Bludomain.com’s Facebook page. Same thing. Posts just restating the most recent email and lots of hidden comments. The weekend came, and I had gone 3 days without any inquiries. Photographers were getting in touch with me and sending their love. Friends were sending me messages and texts. My family thought I was close to having a breakdown. Finally, on Sunday I couldn’t take it anymore. My name was gone from Google. GONE! I got in touch with one of my tech friends who usually helps me with my website when it is t0o “techy”. When he told me this was out of his hands, I knew things were bad. He put me in touch with a guy in New Hampshire, and told me maybe he could help. And this is where things get better…. Enter Sean from Loud Canvas. He immediately moved my website to his server and found my backup files in my cPanel. Slowly but surely, he got my site back up and running. My text was all there! But my pictures were gone. All of them. But that is ok. Bludomain may not backup, but I do. I have all of my pictures from every single blog post that was missing them. In fact… I empty my trash can on my Mac so rarely that I had 6 months of pictures ready to upload again! I had to completely redesign my site, add back pictures, reload links, and more. There was text that didn’t copy over correctly, so we had lots of mysterious symbols that had to be deleted. I have pictures restored on many blog posts, but there are years of pictures still gone. Slowly but surely I’ll get them replaced. I am so thankful to all of the people who helped me during this time, everyone who listened while I stressed, and everyone that was thinking of me. I know there are worse things in the world, but this was a big mountain for me to climb. I love my job and have spent hours and years making my website and blog just right. To see it all disappear in an instant was heartbreaking. If you have made it this far, thanks for listening! I’m glad you found me. If you are a photographer or small business owner with a website, make sure you are doing everything possible to back up your email, website, pictures, and files. As I learned anything can happen!
Nashville Fresh 48 Hospital Photography
Meet Sofia and her Nashville fresh 48 hospital photography pictures. She just turned 1, but I can’t think of a better time to share her birth story! Well, Sofia’s story is more than a birth story. It’s a story of love, determination, and strength. Her mommy and daddy traveled the world, literally, to get her here. What an honor it is to be invited into the hospital room after baby is born! 
Sofia’s Story
“In two weeks, it will be a year since my miracle baby was born. Where did that year go? They say time flies once you have children, but the nine and a half years prior to her arrival did not fly. See, I welcomed her sister, Ayana into the world on November 5, 2007, after getting pregnant on the first try at 37.
Little did we know that the next eight years, instead of another child, would bring doctors, drugs, acupuncture, herbs, chiropractic care, doctors visits and several surgeries, just to attempt to get pregnant again.
The years did not go so fast at that time. Every month was a waiting game. Every few months I knew friends or family who easily conceived and had multiple children while there I sat and could not even get pregnant. By the time Ayana was two, she was pretending to be pregnant and begging for a little sister. At several times through the years, her teachers would say to me, “Is there something you have to tell us?” . Ayana would tell them I was pregnant, but I never was. I had to endure all things baby and kid-related, because I had a child. Those were the longest, hardest and darkest years of my life. I had a child, a healthy beautiful child, so why couldn’t I be happy? That just was not how I saw my life. I wanted to be a mama more than I wanted anything and that was the thing that eluded me the most, while other people I knew just kept the kids coming.
Fast forward through three states , 5 specialists and one country and, I finally got pregnant again.
Over the years I came to terms with not having a child biologically related to me, I just wanted a baby to love and to give Ayana a sister. So, we took a leap of faith after learning about donor egg IVF abroad. In November 2016, our little family of three took a journey to Athens, Greece and underwent donor egg IVF. 8 eggs were retrieved, 5 fertilized and only 2 made it to Day 5. We implanted both eggs the morning of November 5, 2016, Ayana’s 9th birthday. We did not plan it that way, that is how the timing worked out. That is now a special day for two very important reasons. While in Greece, Elias wrote in the black sand, Michele will get pregnant and Sofia Athene Tamene. The waves washed the words away, but I knew in my heart this was true. Nine days later, we found out we were pregnant with one baby and a few weeks later we learned that baby was a girl…”
Sofia’s Birth
“So, to make a very long, emotionally and financially taxing story short, I will fast forward to the happy day. The day I got to experience becoming a mama again.
June 27, 2017.
Sofia Athena Tamene was delivered via a planned pre-term medically necessary delivery at 36 weeks 0 days. After 9 months and a loss of fifty one pounds because I was so sick, my perfect, beautiful second daughter was born weighing in at 5lbs 12oz. This donor egg Greek-Ethiopian baby looks just like her daddy and her sister and brings such joy and happiness to our lives. Shannon came to the hospital for her Fresh 48 photo shoot and I will forever treasure the moments of pure joy we experienced together and that were captured on film.”
~Michele T.
Sofia, you are so very loved.
One of my favorite moments after her birth was when her daddy gave her mommy this card. There were 7 in all, and I got to witness number 2. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the room! These notes were so thoughtful and so sweet. You could feel the love filling the room.
Nashville Fresh 48 Hospital Photography
Would you like for us to tell your birth story? Shannon Payne Photography offers Nashville Fresh 48 Hospital Photography after baby is born. We only take a limited number of sessions each month, so booking early is very important. Contact us to get scheduled today. Visit our Facebook and Instagram pages to see more of our recent work.
Nashville Maternity Baby Photographer
As a Nashville maternity baby photographer, my Belly to Baby package is one of my most popular packages. This includes maternity pictures as well as newborn pictures. I love this package because I get to meet my clients before they hand their brand new baby over to me. I met Lauren and Josh just one day before her due date. Yes ONE day! Doesn’t she look amazing! Luckily the weather and stars aligned so that we could get her pictures done before she delivered. She looked beautiful, and we had a great evening together.
Newborn Pictures
Just a few days later, Lauren emailed me to announce baby Everly’s birth. I got to seem them again as new parents. Sweet Everly was born just before Easter, so we even did an Easter themed picture for her. She gave us some sweet smiles, and let me get all sorts of poses done. Now her family has beautiful pictures to document their last days as a family of two and first days as a family of 3. Welcome to the world sweet girl! You have two parents who a fiercely in love with you, and I am so honored to have the privilege to witness it all. Thank you to Lauren and Josh for trusting me with your baby girl’s first pictures.
If you are expecting and looking for a maternity photographer or newborn photographer, I would love to capture these precious memories for you. My boutique studio is located in the heart of Hendersonville, TN just outside of Nashville. Please contact me so that we can start planning YOUR session.
You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram to see my most current work.
Milestone Baby Photography
One of my most frequently asked questions is “What ages do you recommend for our baby’s pictures?” Well… back before newborn pictures were popular, people photographed babies at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. If you did those ages plus a newborn session, that would be 5 sessions in one year, FIVE! That is entirely too many in my opinion. I do things a little differently. I like to photograph milestones over ages. Milestone baby photography focuses on the fun new things your baby can do. It”s his or her turn to show off new tricks! Sitting, pulling up, standing, crawling, tummy time, clapping, and more. They are all the fun and exciting moments as parents, and there”s nothing better than capturing them on film forever. Milestones aren’t the only things we will document. First teeth, rosy cheeks, long eyelashes, tiny fingers, chubby feet are just a few details that I love to capture. We do all of this at my Hendersonville photography studio, where everything is provided for you from clothing to props and accessories. All you have to do is bring baby!
There are two pathways that I recommend for milestone baby photography sessions. The first is 3 photo sessions during the first year. Those ages are newborn, sitter, and first birthday. This is my favorite package because these are my favorite ages and stages. The second option is 4 photo sessions during the first year. These sessions will fall at newborn, 4, 8, and 12 months. This pathway is usually selected by parents that want pictures more often than every 6 months. Below I have information and pictures from all stages. That way you can take a look and see what milestones you think you like best. I like to photograph all of my baby milestone sessions at my studio. This keeps the look and style of your baby’s first year photos consistent.
4 Month Old Baby Photography
Of all the milestone sessions, 4 month sessions tend to be the most difficult. That doesn’t mean that I don’t love them, they are just a little more of a challenge! 😉 I call this session the tummy time session. However, notice that there aren’t any tummy time pictures! Usually 4 month olds aren’t too keen on their tummy yet. They really need to have great head support to get a good tummy time picture, and that usually comes around 5 months. Sooooo… most of my 4 month sessions take place on their backs. This is usually where they are most happy. I guess I should call these photo sessions “reverse tummy time”! I tell clients that these are similar to newborn sessions, but instead of baby sleeping, they will be awake. Just like newborn photo sessions, I use different blankets and wraps for texture as well as buckets and bowls for props. 4 month olds make fun expressions at this age too. They don’t usually bust out huge smiles, but you can start to see their little personalities.
Sitter Session Photography
Of all of the ages after newborn sessions, sitter photo sessions are my favorites! This milestone usually takes place around 6.5/7 months. I want babies to be sitting steadily for these photo sessions. I always use a spotter by baby in case they start to topple over, but the steadier they are the less jumpy we are! Babies at this age typically have not reached separation anxiety, and they love and smile at everyone. It is just a really fun age! Just like my 4 month sessions and newborn sessions, I like to use layers, bowls, and greenery for props. Sometimes we even pull out a bowl that we used at their newborn session to show how much they’ve grown!
8 Month Old Baby Photography
This is the milestone baby photography session we use if you choose the 4, 8, and 12 month plan. It is very similar to the sitter milestone session, but by now babies are also pushing up into a crawling position and sometimes even pulling up. If you select a sitter session around 6.5/7 months you will not do an 8 month session. Some other fun things to photograph from 8 month sessions are little baby details. Many babies are cutting teeth by this age and have gotten those cute baby rolls. They are also very aware of their surroundings. They may not smile because they are so interested in where they are and everything going on around them. Sometimes it’s harder to get them out of mom or dad’s arms. You never know what you’ll get with this age!
First Birthday Photography
Ahhhhhh……… the big birthday photo shoot! One year sessions are probably the most anticipated session after your baby’s newborn session. These take more planning. They are also more personalized. You can choose just a milestone session to document baby’s milestones at this age. Usually babies are pulling up and standing. Sometimes they are even walking. Although I’d love to get them in for their photo shoot before they start walking! Any guesses why??? My most favorite part of a one year birthday photo shoot is the cake smash. I love styling them, and I love how they really capture a baby’s personality. You can book just a Cake Smash Photo Session or Milestone + Cake Smash. Take a look at my First Birthday Pinboard to see what inspires me. I have all of my clients look through this board to start the planning process. Even if babies don’t like the cake, they are still usually tons of fun. What if they REALLY don’t like the cake? Crying cake pictures are some of my absolute favorites! But we don’t have to do cake, we can do a fruit smash or even a bubble bath. They sky is the limit!
Your baby’s first year is full of growth, excitement, and memories. That first year is going to fly by! Milestone baby photography is the best way to document your baby’s growth and help you hold on to those memories. I offer milestone photo sessions as well as baby’s first year plans. I’d love to chat and find the perfect photo session for your family.
Nashville Newborn Baby Photography
Welcome to my Nashville Newborn Baby Photography page. I am so glad you found me. If you are new here, let me share a little about my photography studio. I have been in business 8 years and have specialized in newborns for 5 years. In that time, I have had hundreds of baby visit my Hendersonville, TN baby photography studio. Newborns are my most requested sessions, and I put a great deal of time and thought into preparing for each and every baby I meet.
This is Nash. I first met his parents a few months ago at their maternity photo session. They are new to Tennessee, and I was so glad they were referred to me! Nash had to spend a little time in the NICU, and I was so excited when he was released to go home.
Newborn Photography Poses
When you book your session, every client completes a planning guide. This planning guide is included when you fill out your Newborn Portrait Agreement. You can request colors and props in this form. One of the poses that I do with all babies is a blanket pose. I use the guide to choose the colors that I include with this pose. As you can see from Nash’s pictures above, I can get a variety of beautiful portraits just using one blanket. Gray is one of my favorites for little boys.
Another highly requested pose is a prop pose using greenery. I have become well known for using natural elements such as wood, greenery, and flowers in my Nashville newborn baby photography. I love the shade of green that we used for Nash’s prop picture below.
Newborn Froggy Pose
Another highly requested pose is the hands on face pose referred to as the “froggy pose” in the newborn photography world. Some babies love it and other babies don’t. But I am always happy to try it for clients if it is one of your requested poses. It is more of a time consuming pose because it requires an extra set of hands. Babies don’t rest in this position naturally, so this picture is actually a composite, or two pictures merged together. It’s always fun sharing my behind the scenes secrets with parents as we do this pose!
Newborn Detail Photos
Many parents love the detail photos that I take with my macro lens. Although I love color images, details in black and white tend to be my favorites. My storyboards with details photos are one of my most popular products. Nash had these awesome highlights in his hair, so I knew I’d have to grab my macro lens to capture them.
Newborn Photography Poses
You can probably tell that Nash was an awesome little sleeper for his Nashville Newborn Baby Photography session. He had a variety of poses, colors, props, and blankets in his session. This wrapped up pose is one of my favorites. The babies that I meet tend to love being wrapped up and tight, so even the fussiest baby loves this pose! (Shhhh… I don’t get fussy babies! All of my tiny clients are perfect little models 😉 )
Natural Newborn Poses
When we were finished with Nash’s session. We decided to capture him waking up. This is one of my favorite things to do at the end of a newborn photo session! I loved all of his little expressions and stretches!
Thank you for visiting my Nashville Newborn Baby Photography page. If you are expecting a baby, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to click on the Contact Page and send me a message. I’ll get back to you with availability and pricing. Make sure you visit my Pinterest page for Newborn Photography to see more of my work.
Kandi Anderson - Oh how my heart sank AGAIN after reading this. I’m so sorry this happened to you. And thank you for sharing it with all your fellow photographers so can make some informed decisions!! So glad you site is up and running and just as beautiful as before!!
Katie - Oh my WORD. I think I would’ve DIED if this happened to me. Thank you for sharing and for the advice!!
KRYSTAL SANDEFUR - This is seriously unbelievable 🙁 I know so many that this happened to. Thank you for sharing your experience so that others can be aware of the importance of backing up their websites. So glad everything is fixed! Makes me think I better be doing a better job at backing up my own stuff!
Natasha Wiening Photography - Thr same thing happened to me, total nightmare! I sat back in my seat feeling numb, it was like someone robbed me of my business and my blog was gone forever! Thank godness I remembered I set up wordpress backups which were emailed to me weekly and I managed to retrieve my blog. I lost a few post but atleast I didn’t loose everything. It is SO important to back up and also save back ups on your own hard drive.
Your website it beautiful by the way!!!! Xx
Courtney - This gave me chills as I was reading this! Sorry that you went through this! Thanks for all the advice…I am going to right now to check and make sure my stuff is being backed up properly.
Loraine - My heart goes out to you. This is a horrible thing to have happen. Thank you for sharing, we all need to be more diligent.